My first week of the course

 Hey all welcome to my new blog!

Recently I've been busy at work on this B2W Digital Contact Centre, Digital and IT Skills Award, I started on this journey as it was sent to me by my job coach, they knew I had retail experience and applied for admin roles in the past. Awkwardly this was a hectic time as I had been doing freelance work and preparing for a job interview and my job coach grilled me about a conflict of interests in my career, I stressed about this, but in the end, it turned out the course was fairly lenient with my other commitments and overall has been beneficial. 

The VLE (Virtual Learning Environment)

My first impression was a bit overwhelming due to my already hectic week as we had a huge attendance and many were figuring out the hurdles of Microsoft Teams, though this quickly dissipated through the week as we got introduced and put into breakout rooms. The start of the course was run by Linda Mariner, but due to various tech issues, Colin Mead took over for the first two weeks. I had to get used to multitasking, as open debate was encouraged by Colin, we had some intense discussions as we covered a lot of heavy topics like discrimination and British values. In general, things have become much less chaotic as a few have stuck with things. 

What we didn't expect were so many ice-breaking activities in the first week so it has been a lot more involved than I expected, open with group work and collaboration. It has been nice hearing feedback as I contributed to presentations, my group appreciated the work that I put into putting our slides together and generally helping with technology, though I missed one of my presentations for an interview, they handled things well.

A Teams Meeting

I have been on this course for two weeks and so far I'm smashing the written work, thankfully from my dissertation experience at university, I have become a master at waffling and padding out the word count. The coursework is fairly straightforward as it's based on things close to my personal experience in customer service, I have passed the first section, but the IT section may be tougher as I have to get my head around technology.

I was initially sure if I could commit to this career path, I'm a freelance graphic designer I could be guaranteed an interview for a call centre role, throughout this, I have been working towards getting two qualifications in IT Skills and customer service. After completing this experience, I feel that this is something I could balance with freelance work, and this will be something to discuss tomorrow as to my next steps.

Thanks for reading my first blog post, I'll keep you all posted! 

Let me know what you think, contact me by email at: butcheredgraphics@gmail.com

Alex